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Michael Egnor wants to know where altruism is

Michael Egnor, tiresome little lackey of the DI that he is, is asking his readers to help me find out where altruism is located. I’m not going to link back to him—sorry, but I’m afraid it would only encourage him, and I don’t want to be an enabler—but I will try to address his flawed question.

He wants to know precisely where altruism resides, and he bizarrely illustrates his question with this diagram.

That makes the answer easy.

Are we done now?

Of course not. We must plumb the depths of lunacy … because it is there! Especially since Michael Egnor gives the worst rationalization for dualism ever. Trust me. This is really bad.

Brace yourself. Here is his argument that altruism cannot be located in the brain.

If altruism is located in the brain, then some changes in location of the brain must, to use a mathematical term, ‘map’ to changes in altruism. That is, if you move your brain, you move your altruism in some discernable way. And ‘moving’ altruism means changing its properties. It won’t do to say that moving altruism changes its property of ‘location,’ because ‘location’ of altruism is the issue. That begs the question.

Does altruism have location? The brain does; it can move in space by moving in any of six degrees of freedom: in a Cartesian system, it can move in the x, y, or z direction, or it can pitch, yaw, or roll. These are the movements possible for a material body.

Now moving your brain through ‘x,y,z’ or ‘pitch, yaw, or roll’ does change its material properties, which are located in the brain. The pulse pressure in your brain tissue is greater when you’re recumbent than when you’re standing (pitch). The venous pressure is lower when you’re standing than when you’re recumbent. Tilting your head to the left (roll) tilts the vector of carotid arterial blood flow to the left. Even material things that are less tangible, like neuronal action potentials, change with brain movement. Action potentials have direction, and can be described using spatial vectors. When you tilt your head, you tilt the vectors along which your axons transmit action potentials. When you turn your head 30 degrees to the left (yaw), you turn the direction of propagation of action potentials 30 degrees to the left too. In this sense, material changes in the brain can map to changes in location of the brain.

But how does moving your brain change your altruism? Do properties of altruism, like benevolence, have pitch, yaw or roll? Is generosity measurably and reproducibly different when you (and your brain) are on the north, rather than the south, side of the room? Are you measurably more or less charitable if you tilt your head 30 degrees to the left? If you walk around the room does your altruism change in a reproducible way? If you stand up, is your altruism different that when you’re sitting?

For altruism to be located in the brain, changes in altruism must map, in some reproducible way, to changes in brain location. But it’s obvious that no property of altruism maps to brain location. If no property of altruism maps to brain location, then altruism is independent of brain location, and it’s nonsense to say that altruism is located in the brain. Altruism is completely independent of location, so it can’t be located in the brain, or anywhere. It can’t be ‘located’ at all.

I read the first paragraph and thought he must be building to something clever and subtle; no one could possibly be making an argument that stupid. I read on, and I realized I was being far too charitable, and yes, he really is making an argument that stupid. Because my altruistic feelings are not left behind in my chair when I get up and walk across the room, they must not be located in my brain. In Egnor’s mind (which is safely situated in a remote location, far, far away from the entity doing the typing), if properties of the mind do not have an absolute location in coordinates of latitude, longitude, and altitude, they cannot possibly exist in your brain.

I’m typing this on my laptop, on my text editor. I’d better not pick up my laptop, swivel around on my office chair, and move it to the other desk behind me, because I might leave the text editor floating in space above my computer desk. Or worse, maybe the text editor will change properties and become a spreadsheet, or one of those programs that control a nuclear missile, or the software interface to a microwave oven. Alternatively, the fact that the text editor still works when I move my laptop must mean that the program actually doesn’t reside in my computer — it’s being beamed in from the Software Soul Sanctuary located somewhere in another supernatural universe.

Here’s another concern. One of the many functions of my liver is to regulate glucose metabolism. Where is the regulation of glucose metabolism located? Well, I’d have to wave my hand vaguely over this great big spongy, bloody organ in my guts, and I’d also have to admit that it’s a property of many interacting systems—the circulatory system is essential, of course, as are peripheral tissues, glands and hormonal regulators, even the brain. Does the fact that it is currently located at 45° 35′ 19″ N, 95° 54′ 6″ W have anything at all to do with its function? Does the fact that changes in glucose metabolism do not map in any reproducible way to the absolute physical location of my liver in any way imply that my physiology must be off-site somewhere?

Of course, to normal people, the idea that the properties of the brain, a computer, or a liver are associated with those objects is not contingent on whether I’m in my chair or on the other side of the room, because when I move around I bring my brain and liver and (usually) my laptop with me. I would agree that my concept of altruism would change if getting up meant my brain would slither out of my cranium to plop onto my chair when I got up — but again, that reinforces the notion that properties of the mind are associated with the brain.

Ultimately, his argument rests on this deeply and obviously faulty analogy, and simple assertion.

Myers makes a category error. Matter and ideas share no properties. Ideas like altruism aren’t material, so they can’t have a location. Altruism has no yaw or pitch or roll. Location is a property of matter, not ideas. Benevolence is a property of ideas, not matter. Matter can’t be benevolent, and ideas can’t have location. And matter can’t, by itself, cause ideas, because they share no properties.

Of course they can share properties. We know that chemicals and the physical integrity of the brain can affect your thoughts, and vice versa. These material agents can change your personality, your perceptions, your behavior—they can make you less benevolent or more benevolent. For a neurosurgeon to claim that the mind shares absolutely no properties with that gelatinous blob he operates on is rather frightening; is he even aware of the consequences to his patient’s mental state if he tears through it? Does he think he’s working on a ball of phlegm, and that he mainly has to worry about those delicate arteries running through it?

Now what I really want to see Egnor do is return to his little diagram. I’ve said where altruism and mind are located, and done so fairly unambiguously, I think. Now it’s his turn to tell me where the satellites and transmission towers and central transmitter of the soul are located.

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Does helping someone with an undesireable task fall under Egnor’s definition of altruism? If so, it’s definitely affected by the physical state of the brain – either that, or our souls get drunk as easily as our bodies do.

“In Study 1, a mild dose of alcohol increased helping among high-conflict subjects pressured to help with a task they did not like, but did not increase helping among low-conflict subjects who either liked the task or were weakly pressured to help. In Study 2, a somewhat stronger dose of alcohol increased helping among all high-conflict subjects pressured to help with an undesirable task, yet again had no effect among low-conflict subjects weakly pressured to help.”

If Michael Egnor REALLY wished to learn about altruism, he could simply buy and read vols. I, II, and III, Narrow roads to Gene land– the collected papers of Dr. W. D. Hamilton. But no, that requires both acumen and mathematics.

Upon further thought, I guess you could make the case that the alcohol study just shows greater susceptibility to social pressure when drunk, so altruism doesn’t necessarily enter into it. Depends how you define the word I suppose.

Everything which Egnor says about altruism apply equally well to, say, grammar and punctuation skills. Is my ability to conjugate verbs, split infinitives and put two spaces after every period my connection to the plane of spirit, eternity and God?

Carl Sagan would never call someone a demented fuckwit, but I know myself, and I, sir, am no Carl Sagan!

Does that mean that if I were to move to Minnesota, I won’t be able to remember ever having lived in Massachusetts?

Welp. Egnor’s the brain surgeon, I’m just a silly little undergrad. I guess the fact that I’m no longer living in Atlantis is the reason why I can’t remember my past lives there. Mystery solved!

Wow. I thought, at first, that he was leading up to this: “We haven’t figured out where, in the brain, ‘altruism’ resides, therefore it doesn’t reside there.” But no. I read it a couple of times to make sure. It hurts my brain when I try to grasp that he actually is arguing that because my altruistic personality traits don’t change when I tilt my head, that those traits don’t reside in my head.

Actually, a few of the things he says there are nicely testable. ARE people more altruistic when they’re tipped over this way or that? Give me a day or so to design the experiment, a lot of rope, and two dozen college students, and I’ll tell you.

My initial hypothesis is that people are going to be a lot less altruistic when they’re hanging upside down from their feet, ‘cos they’ll all have miserable headaches after two minutes in that position.

This kind of stuff makes me seriously glad I don’t have him as my neurosurgeon, and wonder whether he’s actually qualified to be a surgeon.

Because if he really believes that mental functions don’t physically reside within the brain, then he has no business being allowed to cut into people’s heads. Brain surgery involves tragic but necessary sacrifices of neural function, but if Egnor doesn’t acknowledge that things like declarative memory, spatiokinetic skills, or linguistic ability are tied to specific brain regions and pathways, unneeded and gratuitous losses will be inevitable.

I was under the impression that Christianity holds things liker altruism is just pure human selfishness, you know, that whole “humanity is utterly depraved” thing in their TULIP thing. So Egnor is asking you to locate something he doesn’t even believe exists. That’s nice and trollish of him.

We know that chemicals and the physical integrity of the brain can affect your thoughts, and vice versa.

Right there. Physical integrity implies that the various parts of the brain (Egnor, as a neurosurgeon, is aware that the brain is not a homogeneous sphere, right?) maintain their RELATIVE posititions to each other.

I expect my altruism may actually get altered should (for example) my left temporal lobe’s spatial relationship with my cerebellum change by a centimeter or two.

The stupidity of Egnor’s statement is painful to read. Why do you torture us so, PZ?

Amazing. A neurosurgeon who apparently doesn’t understand the idea of emergent behaviour in complex systems. I apparently have a better grasp of cognitive theory than he does, and that scares the shit out of me. Please don’t let the guy operate on me.

At some level most arguments for the supernatural turn out to be category errors (which they ironically accuse us of!) Egnor is reifying abstractions, and turning them into immaterial, supernatural, spooky “objects.” Liberty, Love, Mind, Beauty, and, in this case, “Altruism.”

Egnor should do another chart and start us working on the hard problem of where the ‘speed’ goes when the car stops. If it didn’t drop off by the side of the road, it must be part of the spirit realm.

“My initial hypothesis is that people are going to be a lot less altruistic when they’re hanging upside down from their feet, ‘cos they’ll all have miserable headaches after two minutes in that position.”

Dammit mjfgates you got there before me – I was going to have a bunch of pirates hang them upside down in the rigging. Sure changes you altruism. Unless of course you are an old-style movie star – but then that is easy, the stunt man hangs upside down.

PZ’s question about the location of the satellites is actually dancing around a real problem for dualists – how does an immaterial, nonphysical soul cause the material, physical body to do things? Is there an interface point in the brain?

If Egnor can be goaded into answering this question, 20 bucks says he either admits he doesn’t know, causing the universe to collapse into an irony singularity, or pulls a Descartes and claims it’s the pineal gland, in which case I will probably die laughing.

I roomed with a future brain surgeon in college. Brilliant twisted bastard. Liked to tell his girlfriend he was considering suicide because he liked to hear her get upset. And now he’s cutting into people’s brains. Really.

He and Egnor have me thinking maybe we are expecting too much of brain surgeons. It’s not brilliance that defines them, and it surely isn’t empathy. Perhaps social dispassion, apathy to the shock of cutting into someone else’s head, is what most seperates them from the rest of us. Think undertakers. Both are jobs most of us wouldn’t do.

Actually, that would only go to prove his point. What must be established is that altruism, or any similar concept, is not independent of mental state. So we must then go from the dualistic assumption that our altruism exists outside of the brain, and thus exists despite of our mental states, then prove that mental state has a profound impact on altruism.

This is easily proven with a bottle of Jack Daniels, which I intend to use later on tonight.

Of course, this opens us up to the counterclaim that the mind is the lens through which we experience our dualistic nature. Which of course is unfounded, baseless, untestable (at the moment) bullshit.

I’m actually kind of curious about how things like altitude and rotation could affect the actions of, say, your brain and liver. It’s certainly conceivable that being upside down might subtly affect your thought patterns.

In fact, I’ve been conducting a decades-long experiment in which I spend approximately 8 hours a day in a prone or recumbant position, during which I have observed a substantial decrease in altruistic activity. Although I have not published results, this experiment has been replicated extensively, consistently supporting my findings.

I think what he’s trying to say is changes in the brain (blood flow, chemicals, nutrients) would have to change altruism and then he assumes it is obvious that they don’t.

Well, I don’t know about you, but if someone trips me so my brain falls to the floor I tend to feel less altruistic.

Um, I’d expect tilting my head 30% (and thus changing my blood flow) to effect my altruism in more or less the same degree I’d expect it to effect my intellect, my sense of well being, my paranoia, my grammar, lust, etc. i.e. not very much. Likewise I’d expect a bullet through the brain, or less dramatict a severe head injury and two weeks in a coma, to effect my sense of altruism more or less the same as it does the same list. i.e. A lot!

wouldn’t altruism, ideas, etc be properties of the brain? a property of the light bulb is that it emits light under certain circumstances…a property of the brain is that it comes up with the dumb idea it would be fun to help someone move for a whole goddamn saturday.

I need volunteers for my candy bar flavor experiments. Volunteers will eat candy bars holding them in different positions, and in different locations too. If the bars taste always the same, that’ll be an evidence for my hypothesis that flavor is not material, is not a property of candy bars and can’t be said to have a location either.

I need volunteers for my candy bar flavor experiments. Volunteers will eat candy bars holding them in different positions, and in different locations too. If the bars taste always the same, that’ll be an evidence for my hypothesis that flavor is not material, is not a property of candy bars and can’t be said to have a location either.

Purely from the way logic argument goes, isnt all this example proving is that hopping up and down 3 times, spinning and doing a cartwheel just not cause a physical reaction big enough to affect altruism in your brain or whatever? It doesn’t prove its not there, just proves there’s no change. Um, lots of things don’t change measurably with too small a stimulant.

why is it that indeed the simpsons appear to be the quintessential reference that comes to mind when creobots speak?

It’s like it was designed for the purpose…

Oh, yeah, right – The Simpsons were intelligently designed. Suuuuure! Next you’ll be expecting me to believe in the Great Groening, who suffers for the sins of humanity by being contractually obligated to attend storyboard sessions for the show He once loved and watched wither with the passage of time.

I had to read his article more than once. This guy just keeps getting better and better. Question is, when did his writings start being more than just an April fools joke? To non-ID people, this would have been some time prior to April 1st. For the Disco institute, it will probably become one when they need to sever their ties to him and they need a convenient excuse.

That is, if you move your brain, you move your altruism in some discernable way. And ‘moving’ altruism means changing its properties. It won’t do to say that moving altruism changes its property of ‘location,’ because ‘location’ of altruism is the issue. That begs the question.

This goes way beyond stupid. Since location is the property at issue, then of course it will do to say that moving your altruism changes its property of location — no other property is relevant! Try this:

If neurons are located in the brain, then some changes in location of the brain must, to use a mathematical term, ‘map’ to changes in neurons. That is, if you move your brain, you move your neurons in some discernable way. And ‘moving’ neurons means changing their properties. It won’t do to say that moving neurons changes their property of ‘location,’ because ‘location’ of neurons is the issue. That begs the question.

Uh, yeah, right.

Of course the difference is between a concrete thing like your neurons, and an abstraction like “neurons” or “altruism” in general, but Egnor can’t even keep track of his own point, since he refers to “your altruism” in the first sentence. Yes, of course, “Altruism is completely independent of location, so it can’t be located in the brain, or anywhere. It can’t be ‘located’ at all” — the same is true of all abstractions; that’s what it means to be abstract. This isn’t metaphysics, its linguistics. “neurons” as a general concept has no location, but specific neurons do have a location. Yeesh.

“Researchers at McMaster University have found that plants get fiercely competitive when forced to share their pot with strangers of the same species, but they’re accommodating when potted with their siblings. […] Though they lack cognition and memory, the study shows plants are capable of complex social behaviours such as altruism towards relatives, says Dudley. Like humans, the most interesting behaviours occur beneath the surface.”

Let’s face the facts: the April Fool’s day joke about Michael Egnor being a fictitious character was true – he is a fictitious character because *no one*, not even the Discovery Institute could possibly be this dumb. And to claim that he’s a neurosurgeon? Please. Oh, and here’s a link to Egnor’s screed (I actually found it on google because I had a hard time believing PZ Myer’s wasn’t pulling our leg).http://www.evolutionnews.org/2007/06/please_help_pz_meyers_find_alt.html

You can check your anatomy all you want, and even though there may be normal variation, when it comes right down to it, this far inside the head it all looks the same. No, no, no, don’t tug on that. You never know what it might be attached to.

The only thing which comforts me in this is knowing that anyone who goes to Egnor for brain surgery is probably one of his ‘true believers’ and therefore deserves what they get as a result – good and hard.

PZ, you must be amazingly generous and patient to have actually bothered to address his “argument”.

I spend a fair chunk of time reading early and classical and Neoplatonic philosophy (which I love), but Egnor’s writings sound like the very very very worst of their semantic catergory-shifting play-trickery. Like someone took Proclus and lobotomised him. With an ice-cream scoop.

I can’t believe an educated person, a scientist, can actually fool themselves into believing the claims he’s making. What he’s writing about is stuff that 14 year old kids sort out after quarter of an hour of reasonable thinking. Sastra and AL knocked it totally on the head – he’s taking an abstraction and trying to locate it. Physically. WTF? And he’s an educated person? He’s a scientist? He’s a neurosurgeon?????

He’s gonna be so embarrassed a few years from now.

It’s almost as though creationists like this are publically disembowelling themselves, and the pendulum is about to swing back to common sense, because, surely, they can’t write anymore stupid than this and still expect people to bother to read them. It’s just getting too stupid to bother! It reminds me of that South Park episode where the concerned parents protest, and die, by catapulting their bodies against a building.

If ideas don’t have a location, where does an unspoken idea go when you die? With you into the grave, or off into never never land to fly around on its own?

Um, if ideas don’t have a location, then of course they don’t go anywhere — you seem to have forgotten the premise immediately after you proposed it. And indeed, ideas don’t have a location, clearly, since a thousand other people, some of them in other galaxies, could have the same idea that you never spoke. It is indeed a category mistake to conflate material objects with abstractions. But Egnor’s argument is a strawman, because when biologists talk about altruism, they are talking about actual concrete altruistic behavior, not altruism in the abstract. When they talk about people having an idea, they are talking about a concrete instance of a person engaging in a particular cognitive function. And so is Egnor, except when he changes the subject to the abstraction in order to make a false claim about the concrete. And that’s his category mistake, and it’s the one that matters. It is the capacity to act altruistically that is located in the brain, and there is a casual connection between the state of a person’s brain and their actions, including altruistic actions. To confuse a capacity to act altruistically, or altruistic actions, with altruism in the abstract is a severe category mistake, and to employ that mistake to argue that brains don’t produce altruism is dishonest wordplay: “Egnor’s brain produces dishonesty” is about his dishonesty, specific dishonest acts; it doesn’t assert that Egnor’s brain is responsible for all dishonesty everywhere throughout all of history and even dishonesty that has never or will never occur.

You know, when I see arguments that I disagree with from intelligent, accomplished people, they usually make me stop and think. For example, when Dembski puts out an argument, I need to ponder it for a while. So far, I’ve decided that the argument is incorrect, but I can certainly see how a rational person might construct it and think it makes sense.

This is not one of those cases. This isn’t even one of those cases where a philosopher is saying something that appears nonsensical because he’s playing with axioms that I find silly. It appears to be the sort of nuttery you’d expect from an elementary school kid who is a bit advanced for his age and wants to engage in thought experiments about the physical sciences.

“Egnor really, really needs to look up reification. That’s all that needs to be said, really. He’s elaborating on a whole lot of nothing.”
Posted by: AL

Absolutely correct. At no place in his writing does Egnor (what a Freudian name) define what altruism is, or demonstrate it is in a functional category like memory, vision or hunger.

Altuism can be shown to have evolutionary benefits. Organisms can be encoded with genes that promote altruism. But nobody has the slightest idea yet what that implies for the small scale structure of the rain; it seems unlikely that it means there is an “altruism area” of the brain.

Egnor is not just reifying, he is reifying a concept he can’t even begin to describe & define.

it’s just so damn hard to tell by looking at their writing any more, ain’t it?

I know you know there really is a Michael Egnor, but I know what you mean, and do recall there being some posting on the issue a while back; that maybe all these posts are parody, if not the man himself.

Still, it’s not like we haven’t seen extremely similar arguments from other creobots before, so if they ARE all parody, the joke ends up still being on the DI anyway.

Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I got the impression that Egnor was asserting that IF altruism resided in the brain, then change in brain location would change altruism – and since it doesn’t, altruism must come from. . .well. . .god? Soul? Spiritual GPSes? If you reduce it to the basics, I think he’s saying what creationists and IDiots say all the time – we can’t explain it, therefore goddidit. Of course, using this argument, one could assume that it naturally follows that any change in the location of god would have serious impact on altruism worldwide. I hope he never gets a really itchy spot on his back where he can’t reach it. . .

The creationists have figured out that the stupider their arguments are, the more functioning gray matter their readers lose. And the less gray matter their readers have, the less able their readers are to defend themselves. Their goal is to write an argument so astonishingly stupid that PZ will fall into a coma, Greg Laden will suffer a stroke, and Larry Moran’s head will explode (killing an innocent bystander, no less) . They are certain they will win by this means …

Ha! Gullible Pharyngula readers. Egnor has once again pulled the wool over your eyes, just as he did with his April Fool’s prank a few months ago. Obviously nobody of the intellectual calibre of Egnor could be so stupid and arrogant to seriously believe that the proposed altruism ‘argument’ provides any reason at all to believe in dualism. Far more sophisticated arguments were dismissed by philosophers decades ago.

Rather than critiquing Egnor, we should all be laughing along at his merry little prank. Well done Egnor, well done.

Seriously, does this mean if you’re walking down the street your intelligence is still at your starting point? Seems cartoonish.

Sorry, but it’s PZ’s cartoon, not Egnor’s. If you’re going to be serious, then at least try to understand what Egnor is saying. He said that altruism has no location — so of course he isn’t saying that it’s still at your starting point, he’s saying it isn’t anywhere. And he’s right, altruism, as an abstraction, isn’t anywhere. But when we ask “What causes altruism?” we aren’t using the word in an abstract sense. What we really mean is “What causes the specific instances of altruistic behavior we observe?”. There isn’t much need to be careful about the distinction until someone like Egnor comes along and intentionally mixes them up, employing a category mistake to make a bogus metaphysical argument. (This bogosity is not new with Egnor; it goes back at least to Plato, and is very common among professional philosophers. Unfortunately, philosophy, unlike science, doesn’t have a learning mechanism that rewards correct theses and punishes incorrect theses.)

I think he’s saying what creationists and IDiots say all the time – we can’t explain it, therefore goddidit.

except, in this case, altruistic behavior has a very long record of testing and investigation in the realm of both animal behavior and human physiology.

hence the argument from egnorance mentioned many times.

hell, I thought Francis Collins did a better job of making shit up in his most recent book, where he tried to use altruism to argue for a larger issue of “moral law” that in his mind was the prime evidence for special creation.

It wasn’t a much more reasoned argument, but at least it was slightly more fleshed out.

there was a decent analysis of where Collins went wrong with his moral law argument (and right with his genetics argument in support of the ToE) here:

I guess I was mistaken thinking Egnor was a brain surgeon! I thought I might be able to counter his arguments with a reference to this article,”Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements”[snip] Nature 446, 908-911 (19 April 2007)

The brain damage studies correlate with brain scanning work showing involvement of the prefrontal cortex in altuistic behavior.

While there is not as much information about the brain/neural corrlates of altruism as there is about language or vision, there is still enough out there to show that Engnor is really, tragically, badly wrong. “not even wrong” as the physicists like to put it.

I think he’s saying what creationists and IDiots say all the time – we can’t explain it, therefore goddidit.

except, in this case, altruistic behavior has a very long record of testing and investigation in the realm of both animal behavior and human physiology.

hence the argument from egnorance mentioned many times.

Believe me, I could see the Egnorance, it just seemed like a lot of posts were addressing it as if he’d proposed that altruism DID change when the location of the brain changed. There’s no question that altruism has been studied from many different angles, including the physiological, and has been found to exist in creatures without any belief in god!

I do have to say, though, that at first I pictured a whole bunch of folks building for Habitat for Humanity, each with his or her head tilted at precisely the right angle for maximum altruistic hammering and sawing.

I do have to say, though, that at first I pictured a whole bunch of folks building for Habitat for Humanity, each with his or her head tilted at precisely the right angle for maximum altruistic hammering and sawing.

who knows? you might be dead on as to how folks like Egnor envision the concept of altruism in their minds. He certainly has left the issue open to speculation as to wtf he means when he uses the word.

thankfully, I’m not blessed with the ability to visualize creobot babblings in my own mind, so I just go with what the rational world decided the word means, and then proceeded to study the phenomenon.

Good grief. I thought that this line of thought got trounced in the fourteenth century when people started to pile on the Scholastic school of thought. (they were such hair splitters about things like this that the question: “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” is attributed to them.)

Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I got the impression that Egnor was asserting that IF altruism resided in the brain, then change in brain location would change altruism – and since it doesn’t, altruism must come from […]

Just as it is a category mistake to refer to the location of an abstraction, it is a category mistake to refer to where it comes from, what causes it, etc., but Egnor seems oblivious to the latter, and he readily slips back and forth between altruism as an abstraction and concrete instances of altruism — this is a lot clearer in the original (uncited) article, where Egnor writes, for example, “There is no shared property yet identified by science through which brain matter can cause mental acts like altruism”. Sorry, Egnor, but an altruistic act is a physical act, and physical acts and brain matter share the property of being governed by the laws of physics; the relationship is of the same sort as that between your computer and its calculation of compound interest. And even if you’re just thinking of doing something altruistic, that is still a physical consequence of brain activity, and we can (crudely at the point in the technology) observe and measure such thoughts via comparative brain scans.

Egnor may know how to cut brains, but he doesn’t seem to know much about what goes on within them. I for one would be very afraid of going under the knife of someone who doesn’t think, or pretends not to think, that there’s any causal connection between my brain matter and my mental acts.

… his most severe criticism, which he reserved for theories or theses so unclearly presented as to be untestable or unevaluatable, and thus not properly belonging within the realm of science, even though posing as such. They were worse than wrong because they could not be proven wrong.

“I do have to say, though, that at first I pictured a whole bunch of folks building for Habitat for Humanity, each with his or her head tilted at precisely the right angle for maximum altruistic hammering and sawing.”

Oops, that was a previous Egnor article, on the same subject (I gather that PZ responded to that, and then Egnor responded in turn, but I haven’t followed this.) In it he writes

Of course, objects (like human brains or bodies) that have location, weight, etc. can mediate or carry out altruistic acts, but the altruism itself doesn’t have a location.

This is pretty much an admission that his idiotic screed is an attack on a strawman. He wrote “They believe that the brain is a sufficient cause for the mind, and they see human morality as a trait crafted by evolution. I think this view is wrong.” but “human morality” consists of a set of human actions, and if all of those actions can be mediated or carried out by human brains or bodies, then sufficiency of cause is established, and in any case his nonsense about the location of abstractions isn’t about cause at all and is thus irrelevant.

Erm… Altruism isn’t a concept, it’s a fucking behaviour! Oh god, I almost spat out my post-drinking pasta when I read this! To wit: altruism = helping another to the detriment of oneself. That’s it. That’s all that altruism means. Egnor might mean (what I call) ‘agape altruism’, which is to do so without any desire fulfuliment, but considering that this denies that the desire to act altruistically can itself be altrustic, it streches the term altruism, as Midgely (1979) argues, beyond its use.

So yes, our term altruism, whilst obviously itself a concept, refers to a behaviour, the behaviour of aiding others at one’s expense. We don’t require said concept to be altrusitic, just as we don’t require a concept of urea to have a piss. Which, incidently, is precisely what I now what to do over Egnor’s writings.

Firstly: wow. That was so stupid that it actually hurt. Granted, PZ’s snark helped ease the pain a bit, but still, if it is not some really bad joke, Dr Egnor’s entry makes me embarrassed to belong to the same species as him.

Surely Dr Egnor has heard of this case. I heard of it as an undergrad, in two different courses. It is a classic in neuroscience. That Dr Egnor has missed it is of course possible, and nothing to fault him on, but still, he really should know better. Not only does he call himself a neurosurgeon, he has the credentials to prove it (out of respect for which I will continue not to put scare quotes around his title, or to drop it altogether) — but can he really be that stupid? He must be joking, no?

When you consider the very real responsibility put on doctors’ shoulders, the number of things that can go wrong, and the possible liability if you deviate from standard procedures, it’s no wonder that most doctors don’t question what they’re taught. Psychologically speaking, they couldn’t do so and still function.

Unfortunately, this can make arguing with them (or should I say, arguing at them) somewhat frustrating. Positions accepted on authority aren’t discarded unless you present a greater authority.

Oh Lord (in his vast nonexistence)! I went to look at the article to which PZ is responding here, and found this howler:

Clearly matter can influence ideas (ethanol makes us think differently) and ideas can influence matter (we can move our legs on purpose). No one knows how matter and ideas influence each other.

This from someone complaining about category errors, and arguing that “matter and ideas share no properties”! Tell us, oh Egnorant one, just which “immaterial idea” gets “influenced” by ethanol? Does the immaterial idea “The woman sitting on the bar stool next to me is average looking” become altered by ethanol, changing into the immaterial idea “The woman sitting on the bar stool next to me is the hottest woman on the planet”? If so, then how are the sober people around me able to still have the first idea? If ideas are locationless, and share no properties with ethanol, then how can ethanol influence my ideas? What does it even mean to say they’re mine, if they have no location?

Or is it possible, just possible, that ethanol causes one to have different thoughts, to have different ideas enter consciousness? That ethanol influences, not “immaterial ideas”, but material brains, which then have different ideas?

And is it just possible that it is brain activity, not “immaterial ideas”, that cause our legs to move? “it is desirous to move one’s legs under certain circumstances” might be categorized as an idea, but my desire to move my legs at a specific moment is a very different sort of thing from an “immaterial idea”, and experiments have demonstrated that both the desire — a thought entering consciousness — and the movement are produced by brain activity at about the same time; the desire does not cause the movement, that’s an illusion.

No one knows how matter and ideas influence each other.

In fact, we know a quite a bit about how ethanol changes the brain to cause it to have different thoughts. No metaphysical mumbo jumbo is needed to explain this sort of causal effect. Yeesh.

Can you imagine how incredibly still Egnor must have been keeping his brain while he was writing down his argument for the location of altruism? Wow, not even nano-motion!

What I find fascinating is that he managed to compensate for the rotation of the earth, its solar orbit, the sun’s motion within the galaxy, the motion of the galaxy within the local group and . . . oh, shit, I looked down at the keyboard and forgot something really, importantly relevant. Dammit! That always happens.

Viscount: Does helping someone with an undesireable task fall under Egnor’s definition of altruism? If so, it’s definitely affected by the physical state of the brain – either that, or our souls get drunk as easily as our bodies do.

That just proves that alcohol has both a physical and a spiritual component. That’s a well-established principle of folk psychology, eloquently expressed in the phrase “Demon Rum”.

(But your link seems to imply that alcohol can increase altruism. That contradicts what I just said, so I’m going to ignore it.)

Opisthokont: I am surprised that nobody has yet brought up the celebrated case of Phineas Gage.

That’s the same thing. Phineas Gage had a tamping iron pass through his skull. No one thought to say, “God Bless You!”, which is what you’re supposed to do in that circumstance. So he got possessed by a demon. You’ll notice that there’s no record of a successful exorcism ever having been performed on him.

You folks seem to have trouble grasping what error Egnor is making — which is excusable, because it is so mind boggling. Of course he is unimpressed, because he admits that “Of course, objects (like human brains or bodies) that have location, weight, etc. can mediate or carry out altruistic acts”.

But then he goes on and writes “but the altruism itself doesn’t have a location”. That’s the point where it’s appropriate to stand agape in bewilderment, then recover your composure and say “What the bloody effing hell are you talking about? What is ‘the altruism itself’? We’re talking about altruistic acts and their causal basis. It’s the acts that we are trying to explain, not ‘the altruism itself’, whatever the heck that is. If we remove your brain, you will no longer be able be carry out either altruistic acts or the other sorts that you are prone to. Something related to acting altruistically was removed, and that’s what we’re referring to. If ‘the altruism itself’ is an immaterial idea independent of any brain, bully for it, but it has nothing to do with explaining altruism as an observed phenomenon.”

So one can only act altruistically is said individual possesses a concept of altruism? Shurely shome mishtake! Don’t forget, Egnor never states, at least in Myers’ extract, that he is referring to some higher-order concept of altruism, merely to altruism itself. Perhaps our problem is one of defintions: me using the ethological defintion of altruism, you the moral… yet even if we use the laters, as others have argued, Egnor is dead wrong.

To be fair, Egnor is citing the “Problem of Universals”. Particular properties (i.e. the redness of the book cover on my copy of Jay Ingram’s “The Theatre of the Mind) share universal properties (being red). The problem is do universals really exist? Are particular reds one and the same? The same goes from something like altruism. There are particular instances of altruism, but altruism is a universal.

From what I understand there are many attempts to solve this problem include platonic realism, moderate realism, conceptualism, and nominalism.

By the way it’s ironic that Egnor brings in the concept of a “category error”, since behaviourists developed the concept to refute dualism.

“I have no idea what “altruism itself” is, other than an abstract concept.” -Truth Machine

The debate’s about, whether any of the participants acknowledge it or not, the Problem of Universals. Do abstract concepts exist as abstract objects in a timeless realm (platonic realism), are they just words (nominalism) or do they exist only in mental/neural structures (conceptualism).

By the way it’s ironic that Egnor brings in the concept of a “category error”, since behaviourists developed the concept to refute dualism.

Behaviorist Gilbert Riles, in “The Ghost in the Machine”, to be precise. And in his two pieces on altruism, Egnor commits just that sort of category mistake Riles described, over and over again. But unfortunately Egnor is far from the only one; as Daniel Dennett has pointed out, even died-in-the-wool physicalist philosophers of mind succumb to the notion that there’s a homunculus in the brain watching a Cartesian Theater.

If this is what he calls an argument, and if indeed he expects us to take him seriously (which I can only presume he does), then all I can feel for him is pity in that I have no idea how he continues to function in his chosen profession. How can a surgeon really stay the same man from one day to the next if he’s walking his brain about after work, exercising, running errands, etc.? One would think he’d magically change into a physicist or – gasp – an evolutionary biologist, should he wiggle his head too much the wrong way.

Of course, whether he actually thought out his “argument” or not is beside the question, since it (by design?) leaves them a neat little logic hole with which to claim it is a god helping them to keep definitions in the proper place inside their synapses.

Well, while I agree the Egnor’s argument is flawwd, there is something in what he begins to say, as PZ hinted at. It’s simply Leibniz’s law: if there is a property that wo entites do not share, then the the entities are not identical/ So, if the mind or soul or whatever has the property of altruism, but brain states and properties do not, the they can’t be identical.

I should say that this particular form of argument is probably invalid, although there are those who would argue that it is valid, that may be what Egnor is reaching at.

All of the arguments he’s offering are just rationalizations. The simple fact of the matter is that he wishes to believe that certain kinds of behavior that are given positive ethical weight in his religious beliefs are the result of a magical entity. He will accept any argument that, to his pre-rational faculties, seem to validate that conclusion.

Arguing logic at him is pointless. Trying to induce his mind to enter into the more-complex and delicate state of rationality is so difficult as to be prohibitive. There comes a time when the only productive things to do with people is lock them away or kill them. Neither is likely to be an option with Dr. Egnor. Ignoring Egnor (once we’ve made him the object of ridicule) might be our best bet.

Altruism is a man-made concept. The behaviors which we call altruistic are a complex of behaviors. There is no necessary relationship between different behaviors we might consider altruistic; particularly not for where they might be located functionally in brain tissue.

.

“Egnor is failing to reify, but treating “altruism” as an abstraction rather than a set of observed behaviors.”
Posted by: truth machine

It is quite obvious that when Egnor attributes a physical location in the physical brain to something called “altruism” he does not regard altruism as an abstraction but as something located physically in cartesian space.

He is making a category error by reifying an abstract concept.

You make a similiar category error when you call altruism a “set” of behaviors rather than a “complex” of behaviors. There is no necessary functional or structural (part of brain) relationship between behaviors called altruistic.

Reify – to regard (something abstract) as a material or concrete thing (M-W)

Set – a number of things of the same kind that belong or are used together (M-W)

Complex – a whole made up of complicated or interrelated parts (M-W)

.

Isn’t a “truth machine” one of those fraudulant vocal lie detectors sold at spy gadget shops? “Never be duped again!”

The debate’s about, whether any of the participants acknowledge it or not, the Problem of Universals.

I would say, rather, that the debate is a largely due to confusion about, or failure to appreciate, the Problem of Universals. It isn’t just that the participants don’t acknowledge it, it’s that they don’t grasp the problem.

Do abstract concepts exist as abstract objects in a timeless realm (platonic realism), are they just words (nominalism) or do they exist only in mental/neural structures (conceptualism).

This is a false dichotomy, as becomes clear when one carefully analyzes the word “exist”. To say “Xs exist” is to say that some set contains members of type X. Since there are many such possible sets, there can be many senses in which Xs do or do not exist. If one considers the set of all “abstract objects” of the sort that “altruism” might be an example of, altruism “exists” as an abstract object. If one considers the set of all words, “altruism” “exists” as a word. If one takes the set of all “mental/neural structures” of which “altruism” might be an example … well, I’m not sure that notion is coherent, but if it is then altruism exists as a mental/neural structure. But taking “exists” to be some sort of essential property of a thing, whether a concept or anything else, is hopelessly confused, as Russell pointed out.

And the possibilities you mention are not exhaustive, and I don’t think any of those are good models for understanding concepts. I subscribe to a Quine/Wittgensteinian view that “meaning is use”, that the meaning of a word is determined by the sum of all social behavior in which it plays a role, that it does not and cannot have any sort of meaningful “existence” beyond that, that Plato’s “museum theory of meaning”, as Quine put it, is not a viable model. Because I take this operational view of language, I find phrases like “altruism itself” to be mired in essentialist assumptions. We have the word “altruism”, to which we have given various definitions, we have instances of behavior that we identify as fitting the definition, and we have organisms and classes of organisms that exhibit such behavior under some circumstances. If there is some “altruism itself” above and beyond that, I don’t know what it refers to — saying that it refers to some Platonic reality doesn’t help, because I have no idea what that is, and it doesn’t fit my understanding of the word “real”, which I take as referring to physical phenomena, and nothing else.

It’s simply Leibniz’s law: if there is a property that wo entites do not share, then the the entities are not identical

But Liebniz’s law is well known not to hold in intensional contexts. For instance, you know that the person who goes by the handle “truth machine” is posting here, but you do not know that the person who goes by [my real name] is posting here. Yet they are identical entities.

Consider a listing of a piece of code, and a program running on a computer. Looking at the code, we discern no bug. The program, OTOH, manifests an obvious bug. If we can be shown that the program being run is the same as the program listed, we now know that the listing has a bug. Something similar applies to brains and minds — we are able to ascertain altruistic behavior, or tendencies, in the mind, but can find none upon examining the brain. But that does not refute the claim that the mind is what the brain does.

In fact, I’ve been conducting a decades-long experiment in which I spend approximately 8 hours a day in a prone or recumbant position, during which I have observed a substantial decrease in altruistic activity. Although I have not published results, this experiment has been replicated extensively, consistently supporting my findings.

It was also my reading that Egnor was definetly saying there was NOT a locatable source for altruism in the brain. That seemed essentially his core argument, AFAICT.

but then, I’m seeing all sorts of nuances of idiocy that i hadn’t noticed before TM started pointing them out, so at this point I’m just ready to throw my hands up and chalk it up to nothing more than the usual severe ‘tard from Egnor.

Frontal lobe syndrome was first defined in 1868 by J. M. Harlow. Harlow particularly emphasized the personality and behavior change after a frontal lobe lesion. In the DSM-IV classification system, the main category titled “Personality Change due to a General Medical Condition” includes the conditions related to head trauma. For the child, particularly cerebral injuries associated with severe head trauma cause ordinary behavior changes as well as deviations in development.
…Euphoria, excessive activity or socially destructive behavior (the condition characterized by disinhibition and impulsivity) may occur owing to injury of the orbitofrontal zone of the prefrontal cortex. Frontopolar injuries cause apathy, lack of interest, insensitivity, loss of motions or activities (Caine & Lyness, 2001).

Well, this is only my 2nd post on any blog ever, as I’m usually too swamped, but this one seemed to beg for something. I read Egnor’s commenbts and … wow! I was completely dumbfounded. Awestruck. Dumbstruck.

What is more, being dumbstruck, it has inspired in me a theory so radical, that will tie up all mysteries of physics of so succintly, that I figured I should commit them here before somebody else (like Egnor) thinks of them.

As many here already know, most matter has a property called mass. This property seems to be proportional to the gravitational force. However, what may not be so obvious is that if I take a piece of matter and rotate it, so that the yee and the yaw changes, the mass remains the same. How can this be? The coordinates have changed, and since obviously mass is dependent on the coordinates, the mass should have changed as well! Clearly, the mass is being projected from “the other side”. It seems reasonable to ask from where is the mass projected (where is the other side?). The only answer is that the mass is kept in dark matter and projected from there (so, we expect dark matter to exist, consistent with observations). To touch on another point, we can draw a corrollary from Egnor’s ahem..astute (?) observation. Something falsifiable even. He seems to be desperately trying to imply that the soul is responsible for altruism. Where does the soul reside? It should be obvious to the casual observer that since soul size is below the order of the Planck constant, that the residence of choice for souls is the curled up dimensions of string theory. As the population of the earth grows, more souls are created (or intelligently designed depending upon your favorite MO for your creator). So the curled up dimensions, as they fill with more souls, will push the universe, causing expansion. This of course, explains dark energy. In fact, one sees a direct correlation that as the arrow of time progresses, the earth’s population increases and the universe expands. Further, using relativistic time dilation with [insert furious hand-waving arguments here] that the correlation exactly matches. So, 2 of the greatest mysteries in physics are now solved, thank you very much.

In all seriousness though, I do agree with another poster here that further debate with Egnor will likely be fruitless. His conception of the world seems so vastly removed from reality, that his semantics are totally mismatched from any argument he hears.

This from the hypocritical jackass who, unable to form a coherent rebuttal, made some stupid comment about my handle. I did say something, something entirely appropriate to that comment. And once again you have no rebuttal — Egnor’s words, contradicting your ridiculous claim, are there in black and white, asshole.

You appear to like to pick & choose what you respond to, so let’s look at the entire interchange you “condensed”

“Egnor is failing to reify, but treating “altruism” as an abstraction rather than a set of observed behaviors.”
Posted by: truth machine

It is quite obvious that when Egnor attributes a physical location in the physical brain to something called “altruism” he does not regard altruism as an abstraction but as something located physically in cartesian space.

“How can that be “quite obvious”” when Egnor explicitly says “Altruism is completely independent of location, so it can’t be located in the brain, or anywhere. It can’t be ‘located’ at all.”?
Posted by: truth machine

That is because he is attempting to build a straw man so he can tear it down. Your quoted statement is his conclusion. He posits altruism as a thing located in the brain for the purpose of proving it cannot be there.

By positing altruism as existing in the brain he engages in reification. This is regardless of whether he believes that altruism is a real thing.

You do not appear to understand the word regard v– 1: to consider and appraise usually from a particular point of view 2: to pay attention to : take into consideration or account.

To give regard doesn’t mean to believe in. Egner does appear to Believe that altruism is an abstraction, presumably located in the Soul. He does reify altruism by regarding it as a thing existing within the brain throughout his argument. That is his straw man.

Egnor is failing to reify, but treating “altruism” as an abstraction rather than a set of observed behaviors.

He is reifying. His ultimate conclusion is that altruism must be a “thing” akin to the “forms” of Platonic realism. It’s a thing which exists in another realm (whatever second realm dualists believe in), rather than a concept we’ve abstracted to conceptualize a set of behaviors that have certain noticeable traits in common.

“This from the hypocritical jackass who, unable to form a coherent rebuttal, made some stupid comment about my handle. I did say something, something entirely appropriate to that comment. And once again you have no rebuttal — Egnor’s words, contradicting your ridiculous claim, are there in black and white, asshole.”
Posted by: truth machine

My rebuttal is above. You have engaged in insulting name calling, which I have previously not returned, on other posts. Also, I did not call you an “asshole” or “hypocritical jackass”, Instead I made an ironic comment about your chosen handle.

meh, he gets like that. You should have seen the argument we had about Wiki a while back. There’s another poster on PT that is the same way.

both intelligent guys, often make very salient points, both very prone to utilizing vehement expletives.

just keep working on the points and ignore the rest, if you want to continue, or roll with it and do what I do and insult him back.

it’s kinda fun, actually.

to tell the truth, at first reading I thought you were insulting him via his handle too, but then realized you were just making a random comment that had nothing to do with anything but trying to figure out where the handle came from.

I see what you mean that he set up essentially a strawman argument for the “placement” of altruism in the brain to argue with, but it seems a tiny strawman to use to prop up his larger argument that altruism doesn’t even “exist” in the “material realm” for want of better terminology to describe his inane rant with.

so, a casual reader doesn’t come away with the idea that he was arguing against any specific location, but rather that he is arguing FOR a non-materialistic property of “altruism”.

really, when the inane fluff is stripped away, this does indeed look much like Collins’ argument.

Well, it’s good to know that if I make a trip to Connecticut to help my mother with home repairs, I can’t accidentally leave my altruism in upstate New York. Of course, it could set out on its own for the Wisconsin Dells and get itself stuck in Chicago rush-hour traffic. (Lost altruism must be what explains all those honking horns.)

No wonder Egnor can’t “find” altruism; after reading this babbling font of nonsense, it’s clear he couldn’t find his ass with both hands. How can he be a brain surgeon when it’s so obvious he hasn’t been near a brain in his life?

“Particular properties (i.e. the redness of the book cover on my copy of Jay Ingram’s “The Theatre of the Mind) share universal properties (being red). The problem is do universals really exist? Are particular reds one and the same?”

Really, this is why I’m not a philosopher – I just end up going, well, being red means a wavelength of about 625 – 750 nm . . . and shrug at the actual question.
Well, it’s one reason I’m not . . .

“I find whiny turds like you an opportunity for sport.
Poo-sticks. (ht to Terry Pratchett.)

It’s times like this that I really wish there were a god, so I could pray to him that Dr. Egnor would be on my approved HMO list. Then god could afflict me with a hideous brain disease so I could get a referral to Dr. Egnor. I would be totally cured through the curative power of humor and fun, the actual cure as a direct response from me telling Dr. Egnor (as I was eating some nachos – thanks Kristine, now I’m hungry) that he was fired for being a DI / ID lackwit and toad. This would occur as a result of my altruistic urge to thelp others avoid the stupidity of Dr. Egnor, so it would happen in public, in front of a room full of potential patients.

I must say that Michael Egnor is good for only one thing. A good hearty laugh at all his creationist nonsense. I think he should stick to his Neurosurgery and I’ll be happy to find humor elsewhere.
DenisC

PZ, “The problem with Egnor is that he is claiming that the idea that mind is generated by the brain predicts that your altruism will change when you walk across the room. This is not true.”

Huh! It might change. It depends upon what you’re exposed to on the way, or when you reach the other side.

But seriously, what does he mean by “your altruism”? Does he mean one’s underlying psychological make-up, in relation to altruism, that remains fairly constant over time? Or does he mean one’s moment-by-moment psychological state, in relation to altruism, that can change according to, for instance, an argument with a vexatious person?

What the heck does he think the brain does, anyway, if not model the world & mediate social interactions, etc? Oh, of course, this is the dork who doesn’t accept that we’ve evolved from earlier species of primates by the process of natural selection.

He owes it to his patients to keep up to date, so, bearing in mind that research on other primates informs much of what we know about the brain, is he fit to be a neuro-surgeon? I don’t see how he can be.

Is there a possibility that Egnor is going senile, or is micro-stroking? This would be nicely ironic, but seriously. I’ve seen this kind of obvious, gratuitous error in reasoning appear in previously intelligent people as a result of strokes, drug-induced seizures, and senility.

Everyone: We have got to figure a way to get this guy in a public debate and tape the whole thing. Ignore (ahem) the potential entertainment value, which is considerable. The mere fact that we can pin this donkey’s tail on the DI’s greatly-attenuated wall of folly makes the prospect irresistible.

To put it bluntly, if this guy’s pronouncements can be publicly outed on a sufficiently grand scale, no one will ever take the DI seriously again about anything. They can produce a document with 2,000 ‘dissenters from Darwinism’, instead of just 700, but all we need is this one loopy excuse for a medical doctor.

So, at the risk of speaking out of turn, how about some academics in Egnor’s neck of the woods make it their business to figure out the guy’s habits and schedule of events, etc. and whether he could be roped into some sort of public defense of this nonsense.

We have got to figure a way to get this guy in a public debate and tape the whole thing.

I think we should try to find an atheist, materialist rocket scientist to debate him: “Rocket Scientist vs. Brain Surgeon in a Creo/Evo Cage Match!”

—

As I read Egnor and the various comments here and elsewhere, it occured to me that Altruism (as conceived by Egnor) is exactly as real as God is (as conceived by Egnor). Egnor’s God is a category error.

I’ve often found that otherwise intelligent people will struggle to come up with some conception of God that it is possible to believe in. The problem is that such a God is invariably indistinguishable from no God at all.

It’s amazing that the religious persist in looking for an external source for behaviors. Anyone who has spent a lot of time around stroke victims, brain cancer sufferers, or others who have brain trauma – can tell you that gross changes to the brain affect behavior, mood, and personality. You don’t have to be Phineas Gage to understand this.

> Is generosity measurably and reproducibly different
> when you (and your brain) are on the north, rather
> than the south, side of the room?

In my case I have noticed that my generosity is measurably and reproducibly different depending on how much Jack Daniels’ I have drunk in the last hour. If generosity is not “in the brain” then presumably it wouldn’t be affected by alcohol or stimulants.

Anyone who has spent a lot of time around stroke victims, brain cancer sufferers, or others who have brain trauma – can tell you that gross changes to the brain affect behavior, mood, and personality.

Absolutely. I bring this up whenever someone tries to argue that consciousness exists independent of the brain. I’m astounded by the blindness and denial some people exhibit when it comes to the obvious (to me) implications of these easily observed effects.

Let’s be clear on one thing: Michael Egnor does NOT believe your altruism changes when you walk across the room.

Exactly; he believes it will not – and of course it does not, from which he concludes that it is not a product of the brain, therefore God (or more likely, given Egnor’s choice of graphical analogy, VALIS).

The implication of his argument is that there are aspects of the mind that are a product of the brain, and which should then therefore change as their location attribute changes. This implication is the source of a lot of this chatter, I think. The mind-numbing inanity of his argument is difficult to lampoon, but it’s fun to try.

I do seriously wonder which, if any, aspects of the mind Dr. Egnor does believe are a product of the mind, and which should then (presumably) change in some way if the location attribute is changed. Hence my ostensibly random and pointless list of mental states, emotions and pathologies. Surely there is at least one among them that, according to Dr. Egnor, is a product of the mind. I wonder if he could argue (or demonstrate) that a locational change produces a qualitative change in that state, emotion, or pathology, and offer an explanation as to why it changes.

I find Engor’s argument (quite apart from the blandly inadequate cell-phone analogy) to be disturbing. Are we to believe our bodies are nothing more than receivers for some sort of (undetectable) broadcast? We’re nothing more than radio-controlled vehicles doing essentially nothing, in the service of nothing, at the whim of some (undetectable) controlling heaven-bound soul-entity that steers our flesh and bone around for a few decades before it wears out? Are these entities nothing more than voyeurs? Or parasites?

The hoops these guys jump through in their mad scramble to avoid mortality in the face of eternity. It’s sad. How can they even bear to be alive? I don’t get it.

Are we to believe our bodies are nothing more than receivers for some sort of (undetectable) broadcast? We’re nothing more than radio-controlled vehicles doing essentially nothing, in the service of nothing, at the whim of some (undetectable) controlling heaven-bound soul-entity that steers our flesh and bone around for a few decades before it wears out? Are these entities nothing more than voyeurs? Or parasites?

That was my reading too, Kseniya. Does anyone else wonder if Egnor that his argument also attributes the problem of evil not to humans but to god (because where in the brain does evil reside?)

For over a generation now, I have suspected that school administrators and educational psychologists underwent pre-frontal lobotomies (followed by plastic surgery) some time during their second semester of graduate training.

This accounted for the almost universal stupidity I encountered whenever I dealt with any of them.

When I made a half-hearted attempt at school administrative certification, I followed my habit of never subjecting my papers to any revision (in contrast to the painstaking agony I devoted to all others) before submission. When an EdAdmin professor suggested that I publish, I sensed the lobotomist’s needle, immediately quit taking EdAdmin courses, and never looked back. I think I narrowly escaped the path leading to the Dark Side.

But I digress. I always wondered who that meatball lobotomist would be, and now I have THE ANSWER. It’s Michael Egnor! He must be a busy man.

Now don’t complain about my scientific reasoning. It’s at least as good as his.

“To gain credibility, the mind outside the brain must also be mirrored inside the brain. If your brain didn’t register what the mind is doing, there would be no way to detect the mind. Like a TV program being broadcast in the air, a receiver picks up the signal and makes it visible. The brain is a receiver for the mind field. The field itself is invisible, but as mirrored in our brains, it comes to life as images, sensations, and an infinite array of experiences.”

“So far, the phenomenon of mirror neurons hasn’t been isolated to single neurons in the human brain. Due to the complexity of the laboratory work, it hasn’t traveled very far into the general public. This means that mirror neurons will be held captive for the time being by the belief system of neurology, which is overwhelmingly materialistic. That is, the brain being a solid object comes first while mind, if it exists at all, comes second. Yet I would argue that most of the things we most cherish about the mind, including empathy, language, and learning, depend on mind coming first, and the mirror neuron serves its purposes.”

Has he researched where the sleepy is located? My personal testing has revealed that it becomes much stronger when I’m lying down than when I’m standing up. Perhaps there’s a correlation to altruism involving oh… headstands?

By ignoring the functioning of the brain and trying to put the responsibility for thought on some ill-defined ‘something’ that does the actual work, Egnor is succumbing to the homunculus fallacy. We can’t explain how our minds work by thinking of them as machines operated by a minded entity, because that doesn’t explain how the new entity functions. Sooner or later we have to get down to brass tacks and reduce minds to more basic parts, and the ‘transmitter hypothesis’ is not only unnecessary but is an obstacle to that vital step.

Well now. This discussion has totally ruined my theory about ideas and memory. You see, I’m sitting at my desk and I have to get up and go out my door and down the hall and into another office to ask somebody about … ??? what? or to do … what??? It isn’t until I’ve walked ALL the way back to my office and can let that “idea” that was left floating there above my desk re-enter my brain that I can then go do or say whatever it was that I originally thought to do or say.

I mean, really. Hasn’t this ever happened to you? I could swear that ideas have location in these particular instances. **g**